As I have now become a father I've started to think about what information I have online. If you look through the photos I have online you should be able to answer the following standard security questions about my son:
- Mother's maiden name
- City where you were born
- Name of first pet
- (future) Name of first school
So what is my responsibility as a parent? Should I hide all this data to help my son avoid buzz words like identity theft? Or, is it safe to assume that in the future someone will realize this is a bad idea and come up with better identification schemes for people?
Whatever the answer, I would hate to make my pictures less available for friends and family. Older family members really couldn't figure out a password, much less remember it. I have no way to identify them. I've already configured my robots.txt file to not allow indexing of the photos. I think that I'll have to start 'sunsetting' the photos, not leaving photos older than 5 years up for public viewing. This way when he's 18, most of those questions will be unanswerable. Unfortunate the means that have to be taken to support a system that is woefully inadequate.
posted Dec 29, 2005 | permanent link
